Newspaper On The TV: Guardian, Others Will Develop YouView App

Looks like the idea of newspapers having their own TV channels could finally happen.

Guardian News & Media, together with three support companies, has been granted public money through the Technology Strategy Board to develop TV apps for the upcoming YouView service and Android TV services, Broadcast reports.

GNM was last month named by the YouView consortium as its only non-AV content partner. Together with the media data consultancy Idio, music data specialist Decibel and the multimedia agency Golant Media Ventures, it will develop “an app that will direct visitors to a variety of rich content aggregated from TV, film and music rights holders”, the report says.

From the sounds of it, whatever The Guardian developers would be a platform to all manner of other TV content. “For example, a feature on food could link through to a variety of cookery-related TV shows,” Broadcast says. The project is called Film Ancillary Revenues Optimisation Engine (FAROE) and the technology could be licensed to other content owners. But there is not yet a business model behind the idea.

Broadcast says The Guardian is also working on its own, separate YouView project.

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